​The CIA has released online some 13 million declassified files, most of which were declassified a decade or more ago but which were previously unavailable in digital form. One document stood out as potentially interesting, but sadly there wasn’t enough information in the file to do more than tantalize. A memorandum for the Office of Special Activities from February 12, 1963 is entitled simply “Egyptian Pyramids” and indicates only that a set of “duplicate positives” had been forwarded. It looks like it was a request to forward some photos of the pyramids, possibly aerial photos like those referenced in 1952 CIA documents, but wouldn’t it be fun if it were something else? The Special Activities Division is the CIA’s covert operations division.

​When I was doing some research on claims related to Henry Sinclair and the Knights Templar, I came across what has to be the most unusual application of the growing myth of Sinclair that I have yet encountered. In an edited academic volume called The Year’s Work in Medievalism, 2009, I found an article by Cory James Rushdon describing efforts to locate the Holy Grail and its attendant modern myths in Canada, specifically by tying Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney to Oak Island. As I mentioned yesterday and a hundred times before, this myth is a modern creation by Scottish nationalists, Sinclair family flunkies, and lunatics. It bears no resemblance to facts and has none behind it save for the Zeno Narrative, a Renaissance hoax that actually speaks of a guy named Zichmni traveling to Greenland. Richard Henry Major and later Frederick J. Pohl tried to change that, turning Zichmni into Sinclair and Greenland into Nova Scotia, based on wishful thinking, errors, and rank speculation.

But Rushdon presents the most unusual version of the story I have yet heard, and it comes to us from the Society of North American Hockey Historians and Researchers, a group founded in 2004 that no longer exists in its present form. Its former website at sonahrr.com is no longer active. The group was founded by George Fosty, a historian and the co-founder of Stryker-Indigo Publishing. It appears that Fosty expanded the organization, which is now the Society of North American Historians & Researchers, to cover more sports than just hockey. According to the new organization’s website, the organization was founded because Fosty and his colleagues were concerned that Canadians did not adequately credit European influences in the development of ice hockey. “Today, SONAHR historians are in the forefront of efforts to recognize the role of British hockey in the evolution of the game in Canada and the role of Native Canadians in the development of early Canadian ice hockey traditions.”

Here is how Rushdon describes, with gentle mockery, a page on the old SONAHHR website:

From a Canadian perspective, it is most gratifying to find, on the website of the Society of North American Hockey Historians and Researchers, that the St. Clair/Glooscap theory somehow explains the origins of ice hockey: late medieval Scottish settlers introduced shinty or shinny, a form of field hockey, to the Mi’kmaq, who then reintroduced it to later settlers, giving rise inexorably to Wayne Gretzky and Canadian domination of the sport.

​The older version of the website, accessed through the Wayback Machine, approvingly cited such evidence as the hoax Kensington Rune Stone as proof of European contact (and thus importation of hockey!) to North America in the fourteenth century. This was in service of a rather grand claim—of 1904 vintage—that the Vikings taught Native Americans how to play lacrosse, a game the site claimed to derive from knattleikr, an Icelandic ball game played by hitting balls with sticks, though the rules are unknown. It went on to speculate that so-called “blue-eyed Indians” were actually Norse settlers. “Skeptics claim that there is no evidence of Norse settlements outside of Greenland, Iceland and Newfoundland. However, these same skeptics can not explain the similarities between Norse and Indian legends as well as the similarities between lacrosse and knattleikr?”

The site devoted an entire page to hailing Henry Sinclair as the “first Canadian” and summarizing his life and times, as given by Frederick J. Pohl. Of special note is that the site accepted at face value all of Pohl’s claims about Sinclair being worshiped as the god Glooscap on account of the Mi’kmaq being overawed by his whiteness and his boat. Even the Westford Knight is taken as proof of Sinclair! Pretty much every fringe claim about Sinclair ever made appears on the page, which then concludes with a ridiculous finale that accepts modern Mi’kmaq oral claims about their knowledge of a Scottish ice hockey game called shinny at face value, but only when they agree with fringe history:

The Mi’kmaqs would later claim to have knowledge of Shinny for hundreds of years and given that Shinny was a popular pastime of the Scots, this strongly implies that Shinny was one of the games introduced to the Mi’kmaqs at the time of the Henry Sinclair expedition to Nova Scotia. […] In the end, we may never know the complete story of Sinclair and the Glooscap. What we do know however is, in addition to the previous mentioned archaeological discoveries, as early as c. 1749 AD the Mi’kmaqs were playing a form of primitive shinny on the frozen ice of the Dartmouth lakes making them the first recognized Canadians to have played hockey on ice.”

​The implication is quite clear: Somehow, 350 years after Sinclair cause the natives to bow down in worship of his whiteness, they were still playing Scottish shinny because he was just so awesome a white guy. Shinny is an informal type of hockey played on ice, which as far as I can find was first described in the nineteenth century, and derived from shinty, a form of wintertime field hockey dating back to Celtic times.

Note the circular reasoning: The Mi’kmaq claim is assumed to be true because of a belief in the Henry Sinclair myth, which then proves the Henry Sinclair myth!

Our author, however, leaves out the fact that the game classified as being of the shinny type was nearly universal in the Americas, but was most common in the Great Plains and Southwestern United States. In most locations, it was a women’s sport, and the sheer number of variants show that the Mi’kmaq version, should it be closer to the Scottish rules than others, might be so only due to coincidence or contamination between first European contact and the first European record of the Mi’kmaq version in 1749. Nova Scotia, after all, is called New Scotland for a reason: By royal charter, a Scotsman had had the right to settle the area since 1632. Scottish settlers were in contact with the Mi’kmaq during the long fight to oust the French from what had then been French Acadia.

At some point after 2012, however, the Society must have thought better of the claim that Henry Sinclair more or less invented ice hockey by giving shinny to the Mi’kmaq. The current website has revised the history of hockey to remove the Scottish influence, at least for public consumption: “On the East Coast, the Mi’kmaqs began developing their own hockey traditions using wood ‘pucks’ and ice hockey sticks. This game was very similar to the European game of shinny.”

Shinty isn't played on ice except by accident, it's played on what passes for grass in a Scotch winter. It is an ancient game- like Irish hurling- but was tamed and codified by the Victorians. Before that it was more like war, but with fewer rules.

Of course, indigenous people like the Mi'kmaq couldn't have come up with a game of hammering the lights out of each other without outside help. As you know, it wasn't the Scoth-Norwegian Sinclair (who was busy designing the ZX1400) but the Irishman Mick McPaddywhack (Gifford Og O'Boghan i mBéarla) who took hurling over when he sailed with St Brendan.

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Just me

1/19/2017 01:02:58 pm

I'm pretty sure if I sailed the North Atlantic drinking with the Irish, or the Scots, I'd be hurling in short order.

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John Meffen

1/19/2017 11:18:05 pm

Um, we Scottish people do not like the adjective Scotch, Scotch is a marketing term for Whisky [not Whiskey].

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Just Me

1/20/2017 12:00:43 pm

Hence my reference to Scots, and Scot's Whisky. I also only drink Jamison, as no Protestant Irish Whiskey will ever touch my lips.

kal

1/19/2017 11:56:37 am

Actually, actually.

Maybe if we stop making so many searches and articles supporting this Sincair rubbish they would stop appearing on search lists. They have no claim to anything and it means nothing now, a bit less of nothing than that whole holy blood BS from that French archive.

Hockey was not Golf. Ha.

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Only Me

1/19/2017 12:59:41 pm

I wonder if they changed their history because someone kindly pointed out how stupid it is to suggest only white people could invent a game by smacking an object with a stick.

Oh, wait, I forgot. This idea stems from the same mindset that says non-whites weren't bright enough to figure out how to make piles of dirt or rocks.

It may never happen, but if Sinclair's body were found in Europe, the fringe would simply change the narrative to explain he accomplished his voyage and ascendency to godhood before he died. In North America, after hiding the Holy Grail, of course.

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DaveR

1/19/2017 03:52:42 pm

After burying the Grail on Oak Island, along with the Templar Treasure, the complete works of William Shakespeare, the original cross from Christ's crucifixion and an alien spacecraft, Sinclair returned to Britain to leave obscure clues in road signs, churches, paintings and tombstones so all would know his greatness.

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An Over-Educated Grunt

1/20/2017 08:08:38 am

Read that at first as obscene clues. Was disappointed on correct reading. I mean... "In 1425, the earl endowed Bagodicks Abbey and laid the cornerstone of the first brothel in Kirkwall, notable for its fusion of Templar imagery and winged phalli."

DaveR

1/20/2017 09:23:29 am

The wings naturally reference the ability for flight because Sinclair had the alien space craft. Many people erroneously believe he sailed West across the Atlantic when, in fact, he used the flying saucer. This naturally brings to question "How did he get back without a ship?"

Each phallus points in the direction of another clue to the Sinclair/Templar Treasure Mystery. The length of the phallus can be translated to give the distance of travel through a complex set of mathematical equations.

Kal

1/19/2017 01:37:02 pm

I suspect many sports, songs, and ideas were co opted by colonials from Spain, England and France and Germany, and that a lot of them were not originally 'white' at all, but were from someplace else.

Even the Aztecs had something that looked like hoops, except the loser usually got killed, according to myth.

India invented Chess as another similar game, as did China, and it evolved different rules, to which checkers is a relative. The English co-opted it later.

Hockey as it is now is English colonial and went to Canada. It is a sport played on ice or on the ground. It is possible the ground version could have been invented by any number of other races. You have a stick and use it to whack a rock, basically, and you have a goal.

It almost seems a bit like rounders at first, our some early form of the stick batting game played in south Africa, and if it is like that, then perhaps its origin is very much not white.

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Clete

1/19/2017 07:19:43 pm

Ah, yes, baseball, basketball, football, tennis, golf. All invented or improved on my white Sinclair family members. I wish they would all stop playing with their balls.

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DaveR

1/20/2017 11:36:45 am

Not just playing with their balls, but outright abusing their balls. Their games involve hitting their balls with bats, rackets, or clubs. When they're not hitting their balls with something hard, they're bouncing them off a hard wood floor, or throwing their balls at someone else. This is clearly ball abuse at the highest level.

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John Meffen

1/19/2017 11:26:02 pm

There is a problem of language here.

"this myth is a modern creation by Scottish nationalists"

Needless to say the current Nationalist Movement in Scotland [SNP] does not espouse the concept that we Scots [lovely as we are] seeded North America [or gave you Ice Hockey], and are more interested in the current Brexit shenanigans.

Just Saying

John.

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Only Me

1/19/2017 11:59:40 pm

Maybe you should have followed the link to yesterday's blog post. Then you'd know Jason wasn't attributing the claim to the current SNP.

Here, this will help place his statement in context:

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/prince-henry-sinclair.html

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Jim

1/20/2017 01:30:49 am

Wait a minute !,,, Are you sure they are not talking about field hockey in India ??? Or were the Templars responsible for introducing that to India as well ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Sinclair

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Juan

1/20/2017 06:32:37 am

I'm waiting for the definitive opinion of Don Cherry, eh?

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At Risk

1/20/2017 12:38:07 pm

Thanks for looking into this confusion a bit further, Jason.

I had wondered about this before--just precisely how an American Indian god became a visiting Scotsman during medieval times. We may now see, at least partially, the workings of myth-making in modern application, yes, I agree, distorting history.

In this case, I think it is good to dispel the colliding yet attempted collaborative joining of these two myths which has been taking place, changing, changing, until we have today this functioning collective myth pretty well embedded into not only American Indian "tradition," but also into "fringe tradition."

These "modern" takes on supposedly established Native American myths, combined with the "modern" myth-making involving Sinclair, are concepts that need to be dispelled, as they make those local natives appear to be cashing-in on fake-history. (Along with other fringe entities.)

Sadly, there are the financial angles taking root, too, based in part on the now-well-exposed distortions of these dual myths still trying to merge.... (Not horse-hockey!)

I can't help but wonder how the Chippewa oral tradition evolved with that Nation progressing from the East Coast to the Great Lakes region, I guess around late medieval times.

Are we being asked, provocatively, to consider whether they may have been guided by Glooscap or Henry Sinclair to this splendid area where food grows on water (rice), when the Sioux were pushed away?

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At Risk

1/20/2017 09:08:58 pm

http://sgib.ca/index_files/Page1484.htm

"The origin of this mythical figure is unknown. There are resemblances between the deeds of Glooscap and Viking Gods Thor and Odin, which suggest the possibility of contacts between the two races many centuries ago."

This might be worth looking into (the author sources) to better understand even more "beginning connections" suggesting a relationship between Glooscap and Sinclair.

(And, this is from an "Indian Band.")

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At Risk

1/21/2017 12:28:33 pm

Vinland comes to mind as a logical place where medieval European sports may have impacted Native Americans on America's East Coast...or the other way around.

Who made up the sporadic Vinlanders, and what sports may they have learned or introduced? The same with far-inland America. Sports may have been spread like disease, from either direction. According to Wikipedia (?), "Lacrosse may have been developed as early as 1100 AD among indigenous peoples on the North American continent.[3][4] "

Hhmm...right smack-dab in early Vinland history...and not too far off from Kensington Runestone history. So, who taught who what? Surely, some historic cultural exchanges are hard to pinpoint, or explain.

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At Risk

1/21/2017 01:18:57 pm

Please forgive the further extrapolation, but I can't help noticing an apparent early friendliness between Norsemen coming down into the upper Midwest region from Hudson Bay, possibly as early as AD 1100, and the Native Americans there at the time. I'm taking the liberty of assuming that any Norse venture into the area would have required help from locals, for assistance and for protective help as well.

However, a few hundred years later, around the mid-Fourteenth century, Norsemen traveling from Vinland, from America's East Coast, to this same general area, would have been similarly assisted and protected by a different force of Native Americans...that being the newly-arriving Chippewa. But, we see at some point how the KRS party of Norsemen lost their protection...a day's travel north from Runestone Hill up the Chippewa River, on the west bank of Davidson Lake.

They became too comfortable in their surroundings, and this is where they met the same bloody fate as indigenous peoples by the hundreds at nearby Crow Creek, SD, during the same time period. We can see the KRS's inscription come to life, as the engraver recalls slowly moving closer and closer towards the bodies of his comrades...yes, first of all seeing them red with blood...then very dead.

Obviously, the KRS party were camped too long in one place, in a dangerous zone one might at the time consider a "no-man's land," where tit-for-tat was for real. This party of ten Norsemen were killed, apparently, by the same kindred folks who a few hundred years earlier had perhaps assisted and protected Norsemen coming down from the north, rather than through the Great Lakes from the east.

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Anonymous

1/21/2017 01:29:24 pm

Just stop please. Your comments are uninteresting, irrelevant, and repetitive. You are now commenting to yourself just so you can bring up the KRS so you can eventually link to your own website again. If no one responds to your comment it certainly doesn't mean that you need to, it means that you are being ignored.

At Risk

1/21/2017 11:08:59 pm

Uh, you could be wrong. I added something new. What did you just add, besides identifying yourself as a blog troll.

A true sign of a blog troll is someone who attacks, but doesn't add anything to the conversation. By the way, I haven't been actively trying to steer anyone to my website, unless there is a relevancy.

Americanegro

1/22/2017 06:56:53 am

Sorry, Jason, but the Office of Special Activities is not "the CIA’s covert operations division."

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.